LIFE: Love Infinitely Furthers Evolution by Sander R.B.E. Beals (good books to read .txt) 📖

though, the bubbles on a plane between two bubbles react exactly like the ones on top of your cappuccino: bubbles may collapse, and make a hole in the surface, an interface that allows the big bubbles to interface, and achieve balance again. If that happens, the surface may be broken down partly or even totally, and in the last case, a new bigger bubble might be created, just like sometimes happens to soap bubbles: it is a sort of reversed cell division, which leaves one unified system (a bubble) behind. Still though, the rules of perfect balance may be off still, in which case the combined bubble decomposes a few neighbors, or implodes because it structural integrity is no longer possible to hold up ;-)

Now we can all decide on whether this is good or bad, but we're talking about the bubbles in our cappuccino for God's sake! The hissing turmoil with which the foam got into your cup in the first place may have been scary, but you are not, once you took a sip and made that moustache appear on you lip!

Yes, a supernova would be bad when we imagine it from our Earth-centered nature. But in fact, it is just a star giving birth to yet another phenomenon. Like our baby making its way into the world, our supernova just trades up its relative part of space towards roomier living quarters. In that same analogy, the planets that were its playmates are recycled, and the resulting entity plays with the bigger boys now, the ones that keeps its environment in check.

And with that, on the reread, we've reached the end of WaterWorld, where the sailor says his goodbyes to the little girl: "I don't belong here, it doesn't move right", even though the love he feels for both ladies is beyond anything imaginable!

This stairway to bigger masses goes way up, even to the massive black holes the Hubble has unveiled for us because we wanted to see them. But we stick to the surface, simply because we need bigger stuff to give us enough lift to get past the next boundary. But more on that later, it doesn't belong here, just like the sailor...

"Merlin" is up next, a movie which I must claim I haven't seen yet. And I'm staring at a page that is virginally white, just like my expectation of the movie experience.

Surf's Up, Dude(tte)s!

This chapter and the moments of the Now leading up to it, are all mostly in the sign of the keyboard. It holds a special place in my being ever since a dear friend of mine and I talked about designing a custom one for those of us who have trouble using one, like Stephen Hawking. Basically, it would be a completely programmable one, so the user could define his own character set, which might be totally different from anyone elses keyboard. Like so many others, that project hasn't come off the ground yet, but the term keyboard was forever etched into my mind.

Then this morning I met a mate of mine on the train, and he mentioned that for his birthday, they were giving a friend of his a new keyboard. "Hmm, pricey gift!", I figured, thinking of one that makes beautiful music. But no: even though it was a dedicated Gamers keyboard, it was nowhere near that expensive.

And then, walking to the office from the train, I finally got it: music is just another language, like any sequence of something. If we fold a DNA string flat, so it no longer winds, then the four coded molecules might well be taken as notes, or the letters of a four-letter language for those who are sexually frustrated, because they can't get to exchange DNA ;-). To say it in dear Lara's voice in Tomb Raider 2: "the Sound is the Key!"

So now I had the musical keyboard and its alphanumerical brother, and the GUT feeling that a third board needed to complete our notion of boards other than planks. Thinking about the surfer dude in "Earth girls are easy", I wasn't going to get bored anytime soon! Because if I add the surfboard to our Trinity, then then we can 'abuse' this term because of the surfing on the Web. And thus, if we look at these three boards, we see the following:

Waves go in, which are mostly the wavy movements of our hands dancing across the keyboard's surface. A more mystical wave would be our hands above a Theremin, which produces tones which are a function of the (light and dark) movements of our hands above it.

Waves come out, whether they be strings of letters and digits, musical notes and / or sounds, or some movement of information across the World Wide Web. In the case of a normal surfboard, the relative movement of the surfer on the board would cause waves on the big wave.....

There is some sort of translation being done by the board in between, so one becomes the other, which makes us want to call the board an interface: it connects us to our beloved computers and the Web, or to our beloved Music, or the ocean. Much like in the Fantastic Four, Rise of the Silver Surfer! He got his power from his board...

But is it really an Interface? As I said before, looking at it from the Systematic side, it would be very doable to consider the board a System, that turns one (set of) wave(s) into another! And that goes for the keyboard as well as the surfboard! After all, on a surfboard you have to generate moves in sync with the wave under the board, in order to negotiate the waves coming up from the sea below. Negotiate: now how did a word pertaining to setting up of a dialog end up here? Which of course neatly shows that such a 'translation' is a symbiotic function, where both 'exterior' Systems have to work together to keep the connection (the intermediate System or Interface) alive and kicking: if the surfer falls, he or she basically 'wipes out' the existing interface between him or her and the wave.... Note however, that even though the interface was lost, the contact between man and sea still exists, has intensified even because the board is no longer in between! Same thing when we wipe out, and think that the Cosmos has stopped helping us: You will never be more immersed in help than your are right there!

And right this moment, a truck from an Eastern European company pulls up outside my window: its lettering is highly suggestive of the fact I still have something to realize: TRANSSERVICES....

Yep, realization is a fierce tool, better than a pen or even a keyboard: As I basically stated that 'languages' can be a lot of stuff like:

language in the 'normal' meaning of the word.

mathematics as the only truly universal language (sorry Ellie, not true ;-)

music and song as artistic languages.

chess moves that make up a game, and its eventual outcome (a duet/duel of moves).

DNA strings as a sequence of base pairs, and its 'wavy' form suggesting soundwaves...

Recycling as a string of humans handling various wastes to generate waves towards a better world!

The last one is a deep one, for without knowing about one another, these humans still get things done. But if I as an end consumer crush all my cans (not on my forehead, silly!) so they take up less space, then the processor in the recycle plant can no longer read the aluminium label on it, and process it as such. Still though, nothing in the Cosmos is unique: by gauging the weight against the volume of the crushed can, the presence of aluminium can be determined as well, essentially because the volume / aluminium ratio is now nearly 100%. All is relative!

All of these are waveforms of some form or other, interacting as waveforms do: two sources already make quite an interference pattern, and like our vision, there are not just two sources, but many. Likewise, the waves don't just exist outside the Systems and inside the Interfaces, because of the analogy of a beam of light going through a glass window: in that case there is light everywhere, both outside and inside the glass. For other systems like a brick for instance, it may not be so obvious, because bricks don't let light through, right?

Well, as a matter they do, but they are like a cutoff filter that takes out the higher frequencies. Still, the Infrared light does heat up the brick, so the other side of it will eventually be sending out waves of Infrared, or heat! This effect is most peculiarly seen in some wine cellars: the wave of the average temperature outside over the span of years would result in an opposite wave of indoor temperature during a season, as measured in a scientific experiment. The traversal speed of the temperature through the walls of the cellar was responsible for the slowing down of the temperature wave across the cellar.

So basically, the whole of the Cosmos is a bit like chain mail the knights of the Round Table used to wear: interlocking rings, connected in both horizontal and vertical direction. But since the world of information has no 'hindrance of being in the same position', the directions here are as infinite as the viewpoints we entertain...

In fact, the first notion man had of electronic memory was not unlike chain mail: they'd make wooden frames, and weave onto those a set of crossing wires, which went through small magnetic rings at each intersection. By making certain currents run through the wires, they were able to magnetize the rings in one direction or the other, and thus store ones and zeroes there. But that was a long way back, somewhere around the time I was born. With about one bit per square millimeter (or even less), these are no match for todays storage systems: even a simple 32 GB MicroSD card in your phone takes up about the same physical space as a 3x3 set of magnetic rings, but stores more than 30 billion times the amount of information!

And it is not just informational space that is condensing more and more: our hardware shrinks just as fast! Where I used to experiment with electronic parts like resistors, capacitors, transistors, and maybe some logic circuits, which were typically a few centimeters long, these are but mere specks on todays circuit boards! LEDs used to be 5 millimeter, and now we have 2,073,600 of them neatly lined up in one 1920x1080 High Definition TV screen of just 32 inches across!

Where handheld devices used to be held with both hands and performed only one function in the seventies and eighties, todays cell phones combine all useful personal functions, and are limited in their minimum size only by the desire of their users to actually see something on the screen, and type in the text. Imagine what would happen to the phones once a stable neural link could be achieved to interface us with it, or even a head-on display in a pair of sunglasses, and real error-free dictation....

Considering only those two directions of compression, where more and more functionality and ideas get crammed into less and less space, isn't it logical that we figure the Cosmos is expanding? It is expanding alright, but towards all extremes, even that of nothingness: stuff gets smaller all the time, where physical space is concerned (even if we consider that physical length is a human definition), and it gets bigger all the time when we look at it from the functional point of view: where TV cameras used to be big wooden boxes on rolling tripods, they are no more than a teenie tiny 2 millimeter lens on your phone, and a few integrated circuits that a normal man couldn't even build into the phone! For that, we have specialized machines that solder together entire printed circuit boards in one neatly controlled wave of hot liquid soldering solution. Even here, waves rule!

But let's get back